White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Benefits of Natural Gas

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Natural gas is nifty stuff. It burns twice as clean as other fossil fuels, leaves no ash to be disposed of and is critical to many industrial processes.

It is used for everything from drying grain to distilling liquor. It also can fairly easily substitute for oil as a transportation fuel. Buses in big American cities increasingly run on it, as taxis in Australia have for years.

Its history is a tale of how markets work, how technology can broadside the best futurists, and how planners and politicians can get it wrong.

More important than the lessons of history is the fact that we appear now to have more natural gas than was ever predicted, and we can look forward to possibly hundreds of years of supply at present rates of use. And it could slay the foreign oil dragon, or at least maim the brute.

Trouble is, because of its tortured history, natural gas has often been put on the back burner.

When the first commercial oil well, the Drake, was sunk in western Pennsylvania in 1859, natural gas, or methane to give it its proper classification, was not on anyone’s mind except deep miners, for whom it was a lethal hazard. The Oil Age began without natural gas. When it was found in conjunction with oil, it was unceremoniously burned off: a process known as flaring.

In the United States, natural gas faced political problems as well as infrastructural problems. Natural gas production was regulated by the predecessor of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the Federal Power Commission. It was bound by a legal ruling known as the Permian Basin Decision that kept the price of natural gas artificially low, discouraging new supplies and new infrastructure, such as processing plants and storage. This led to shortages and to a lack of confidence in the future of natural gas.

During the energy shortages of the 1970s, natural gas was discounted by the government and much of industry. Congress panicked and passed a piece of legislation called the Fuel Use Act, which forbade the use of natural gas for many things, including pilot lights in new kitchen stoves. Utilities were told not to even think of burning natural gas: It was too precious and there was too little of it.

Gas demand declined precipitously in the 1980s. And in 1987, the Fuel Use Act was repealed. Along with deregulation of gas, a gas boom resulted.

But it was technology that changed everything. New drilling techniques increased supply. New turbines, based on airplane engines, started to enter the electricity market. They were clean, easy to install, and reached high efficiencies of fuel-to-electricity conversion. Today, 30 percent of our generation comes from these “derivative” machines.

So successful was natural gas in the 1990s that new concerns about supply shook the industry; and the public was told that gas would have to be imported from the Middle East, especially from Qatar. Permission was sought to build dozens of liquefied natural gas terminals around the coastlines.

Now it looks as if natural gas is a fuel with an enormous resource base–thanks to technology. The technology in question is horizontal drilling. Imagine you sink a hole 2 miles into the earth and then send out horizontal roots in all directions from this vertical trunk. That, in essence, is horizontal drilling and it makes available trillions of cubic feet of natural gas trapped in close formation shale deep in the earth.

Ironically, or fittingly, this takes the energy story back to Pennsylvania where a vast shale field called the Marcellus is being developed and will write the next chapter of hydrocarbon energy. This is good because it is plentiful, it is here and it builds on extant pipeline infrastructure.

Of course, it makes investments in many “alternative” sources of energy, particularly ethanol from corn, look like very poor investments. Cars and trucks that run on natural gas are an appealing alternative to ethanol with less disruption of the food chain and stress on the farms. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Virtues and Vices of a Press Secretary

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The stature of some press secretaries grows the longer they are away from the podium in the James S. Brady briefing room at the White House. Others fade quickly. Brady himself is known more for his role in fighting for gun control than he is for his time as Ronald Reagan’s spokesman. His tragic wounding and subsequent disability dwarf whatever he said in his press briefings.

Jerry terHorst, who resigned after only a month in the job because his boss, Gerry Ford, lied to him, was a hero to the press for about as long as he had been press secretary. He ended up working for the Ford Motor Company.

Bill Clinton’s second press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, had a rough ride in the job and a modest career in journalism since then.

Among the revered are Marlin Fitzwater, who served George H.W. Bush; Jody Powell, who was Jimmy Carter’s press secretary and has just died of a heart attack; and Mike McCurry of the Clinton administration. George W. Bush burned through two press secretaries before he tapped the beloved Tony Snow and the admired Dana Perino.

Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, gets mixed reviews. He said that he talked to Powell and others about the job, but he executes it in his own eccentric way. This has some of the White House press corps up in arms and others giving him a passing grade. It is a classic case of where you sit.


The irritation begins with time-keeping. For Gibbs, but not Obama, nothing seems to go on time. The principal press briefing–the one seen on C-SPAN–is scheduled the night before, and reporters are e-mailed this along with the president’s schedule for the next day. Sometimes, this schedule arrives after 8 p.m., making the planning of the next day difficult.

That is only the beginning of the time problem. Invariably, the briefing time slips the next day. Updates delay the beginning of the briefing by one or more hours. But that is not final: Gibbs may make his entrance 20 or more minutes late and without apology.

Then the fault lines within the press corps really open up. They have to do with who gets to ask questions and who is shunned—and this, in turn, has to do with who has assigned seats and sits in the first two rows.

There is ugliness here. Here is class warfare by employment, and here is an unwitting exposure of the White House’s hand.

Clearly, television counts more than print–even dominant print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Likewise, it is revealed in Gibbs’ world that the Associated Press trounces Reuters and Bloomberg. The foreign press gets very short schrift.

Gibbs’ clear favorites are the television networks and a new crop of correspondents he got to know on the campaign trail. Correspondents like Chuck Todd of NBC are often engaged in a colloquium to which the three dozen or more other correspondents are just spectators.

If you are not one of the favored, you sit in one of the back rows with your hand in the air for favor of recognition to ask a question. It does not happen often.

There is much less criticism of the substance of Gibbs’ answers than there is with his tardiness and favoritism. Gibbs will contentiously argue a point with a reporter, but he also will refreshingly admit when he does not have the answer. Also he does not indulge in dead-end referrals, such as “I refer you to the CIA,” or “I refer you to the vice president’s office.” George W. Bush’s first two press secretaries, Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, did this with exasperating frequency. Snow turned away wrath with philosophy and Perino handled heckling press with humor and efficiency.

Unfortunately, Gibbs’ fascination with a small number of TV reporters has carried over to the full-blown press conferences. The chosen few are again the chosen few. The rest of us are right there with the plotted plants: to be seen but not heard.

All the News That’s Fit To Read

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And the winner is …. “Diane Sawyer to anchor ABC ‘World News.’ ”

 

In case you missed it, right up there with Afghanistan, health-care reform and swine flu is the news that someone other than Charles Gibson will be anchoring the flagship ABC evening program “World News” next year. Whew! Yes, Diane Sawyer is going to read us the news–all 22 minutes of it.

 

And why not Diane Sawyer? She is one of the most gifted people working in television, and she must be heartily sick of getting up at 3:30 a.m.

 

If there is a better resume floating around ABC News, it is hard to think whose it might be. Sawyer got her start as a local television reporter in Louisville, Ky. She worked as a press assistant in the Nixon White House. After Nixon’s retirement, she helped the president write his autobiography and prepare for the legendary interviews with British journalist David Frost.

 

In television, Sawyer has been a star for nearly 40 years. Energy, ability, hard work were taken at the flood and led on to victory. Compared to the dolly-bird journalists so favored in television these days, all peroxide and lip gloss, Sawyer is the real thing: an capable, experience journalist.

 

So why is she going to helm the evening news? Because, foolishly, both we and the networks–even in the twilight of their being–are in a time warp where we think it is important who reads the news at night. It is the Walter Cronkite-Edward Murrow legacy.

 

Yet those of us who know something about television, know that reading the news is a sinecure. If you are a halfway decent sight-reader, the work is light lifting. The networks and the anchors have tried to conceal this by making the anchors “managing editors,” but the subterfuge has its limits.

 

Television news is put together by a phalanx of producers and correspondents and it is, in fact, hard for the anchor to substantially reshape the product. The anchor’s views can be known and over time, and he or she can change the product by changing the culture. This can also be expressed as firing people you do not agree with. A friend of mine at ABC got cast into outer darkness when the anchor changed.

 

These upheavals are taken for granted. Television is a tough business in which the few who get to the top are well rewarded, but many fall victim to the star system and the star’s team.

 

I wrote for television anchors once and they were of two schools: Those who showed up and read what was put in front of them and those sought to influence what was put in front of them. We, the writers, liked the former and loathed the latter. We were proud of our work and did not want it denigrated by some star.

But the networks want to promote the concept that the newscaster is some kind of uber-journalist who spends long hours covering the news, bullying sources, confronting bureaucrats and exposing fraudsters. In reality, they are driven around in limousines, have lunches with other famous people at expensive restaurants, and spend a lot of time suggesting to the producers that they read an article in some newspaper, especially The New York Times. Often the skill of the producers is in parrying these suggestions. In Evelyn Waugh’s great comic novel “Scoop,” the protagonist parries the proprietor’s suggestions by saying, “to a point, Lord Copper.”

 

As fewer and fewer of us get our news from the networks, it is curious that who is going to read it to us is still newsworthy. It is not curious why someone would want the job. It pays wondrously and has all the prestige you can stand. The only downside is the ratings: the daily goad delivered by the Nielsen company.

 

I think Diane Sawyer will be a great anchor and she will be able to take it easier than at “Good Morning America.” But we will be deprived of her talent which has shined at breakfast time for a decade. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

The CIA’s Private Suburb

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Reston, Va., was founded as a model community. It lies about 20 miles west of Washington, D.C. and 15 miles from Langley, Va., home of the CIA.

From its founding idealists made their homes in Reston, as did employees of the CIA. It was a live-and-let-live place. It was a place that asserted its residents had things right in their heads: They were against racism, for peace, and for toleration of divorce and differing sexual orientation. They spoiled their children, enjoyed their martinis, and tried to be humble in a superior kind of way.

The CIA types fit right in with the other Restonians, partly because they were no different and partly because no one knew who worked at the CIA in the late 1960s. CIA employees talked vaguely about jobs in government, but did not spell them out. Novelists and newspapermen wrote that the CIA was headquartered in Langley, but casual travelers could not tell exactly where. On the George Washington Parkway, the sign for the turnoff for the agency said something about the Virginia Department of Highways.

Not only did the dreamers in Reston not know how many of the CIA’s employees lived among them, came to their parties and played with their children, but they also could not believe that their neighbors had anything to do with the big, bad things the CIA did, like overthrowing governments, assassinating dictators and pushing the envelope in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Overthrowing the duly elected but far leftward Salvador Allende in Chile was not something you thought your cheery neighbor had a hand in.

Then, the CIA came in from the cold. It stopped pretending: It got its own road signs, employed a public relations staff and joined the suburban life in Northern Virginia without artifice. In ultra-liberal Reston, people simply believed that their CIA neighbors, who would identify themselves as working for “the company,” were the good spies not the bad operatives. Rather than ostracizing the company’s employees, Restonians venerated them. Spies were cool: “I know you can’t tell me what you do, but I think it’s very romantic.”

All of this came flooding back to me, along with my own days in Reston, when I read about the advanced interrogation techniques practiced by the CIA against high-value prisoners. Are the people who make prisoners stand naked and have their heads banged into a wall the same people who are active in soccer coaching on one of Reston’s many sports fields​?

Are the seemingly benign bureaucrats, who yawn early on Friday evenings after a hard week, the same splendid guys who deprive prisoners of sleep for 180 hours, keep them in bright lights and with noise as loud as a locomotive up close? Are the guys who watch out for their kids at the pool the same fellows who do the water-boarding at secret prisons?

Do the wives who drive large cars, because their husbands would be too cramped in a small car, know that these same husbands stuff prisoners into crates where the pain might force a confession? Do the good people living the American Dream in bucolic Reston also enjoy walking on what former vice president Dick Cheney called “the dark side?”

Who are the advanced interrogation specialists? Are they secret sadists, super-patriots or just run-of-the-mill government employees?

Is my consternation at the knowledge that the CIA did things to prisoners that could be called torture naïve, a liberal indulgence? What would I do if I worked in Langley as well as lived in idealistic Reston? Would I “walk on the dark side?” Is it the torturer next door or the one within which has me in shock?

 

Reston is increasingly just another suburb shorn of the better-world pretensions that ruled in the late 1960s and though the 1970s. The residential requirements of the CIA’s employees are no longer notable—just its actions.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boneyard for the Graybeards

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He moves across the lobby of Washington’s Metropolitan Club with the assurance of a man in his own environment. This is the habitat of party elders, Republican and Democratic. This is their comfort zone– safe, secure, orderly and predictable. This is where graybeards lunch, scheme and reminisce. It is as someone once called it: a hotbed of social rest.

Here on the well-worn Persian carpets, men and women of achievement in many fields, not the least politics, talk over unexceptional food, always with an eye for another grandee who deserves a wave across the dining room.

The man who just entered the lobby is a Republican through and through. He has done a lot for the party; has advised at the highest levels, since the Reagan presidency; and has been rewarded with a major ambassadorship. He will know a lot of people in the dining room on any day and even more will know him.

To dine at the Metropolitan Club is to step back to a time when eminent graybeards—yes, they were almost exclusively men and almost all lawyers–worked behind the scenes to help presidents and their parties. Names like Barbour, Clifford and Cutler come to mind.

Now lobbyists now whisper in influential ears, and the doyens of the Metropolitan Club are not in demand. Like the Georgetown dinner party, some things are now in the past.

There is no time for profound consideration, no time to weigh the data and no time to exercise institutional memory. Omar Khayyam’s moving finger writes very fast now; so to deal with new situations and crises, politicians fall back on old ideology. “Is it progressive?” ask Democrats. “What is the free-market solution​?” ask Republicans.

Blame the warp-speed news cycle, and its overemphasis on politics over programs; the quick response over data and rumination. The relentless news machine wants speedy answers, everything in an instant.

A few blocks from the Metropolitan Club, the bloggers and twitterers in the White House press briefing room parse and comment upon the words of press secretary Robert Gibbs just as fast as he speaks. This is a de facto system where the trap is constantly sprung for the gaffe not the substance. If no gaffe is likely to occur, induce one.

Step forward Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times with her race-heavy question about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. This happened at the end of the last presidential press conference, when the chosen reporter usually goes for something light or fun. Not Ms. Sweet.

A few seconds at the end of that press conference eclipsed President Barack Obama’s earnest but dull defense of his health care reform proposals; eclipsed the previous 55 minutes. Obama was in a place he did not want to be, and he would stay there for weeks. No time to ask some party elder how best to handle the situation.

If Democratic grandees are sidelined in the new news-driven politics, then Republican statesmen, like the man at the Metropolitan, have been sent into exile. They can write an occasional op-ed and argue at think-tank seminars. But for now, the party has been hijacked by its broadcast wing. Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Mark Levin have become the censors of the party. They intimidate its elected officials and will brook nothing they hear from their own wise counselors.

The Health Care Fix That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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Workaround is a made-up word that came to us from the computer industry – at least, that is how it came into general usage. In that industry, a workaround can be a crafty piece of engineering to get the results you want without infringing on someone else’s patent.

 

Watching President Barack Obama at last week’s prime-time news conference, one had the feeling that he was engaged in a workaround. He was selling a vague health care reform proposal. His spiel was very long because he was selling something that is still a work in progress. Worse: Whatever Obama gets is not going to be the real thing. It is going to be a workaround.

 

One has the feeling that congressional pusillanimity has the Democrats and their leader working around what at heart they know is the only solution to the challenge of health care – a strong federal role. Call it the solution that dare not speak its name, like Oscar Wilde’s love.

 

One had the feeling in the East Room last week that the president wanted to lay down the burden of political gamesmanship and say, “National systems work from Taiwan to Norway, Canada to Australia; why, oh why can’t we face this reality?”

 

The first answer is that no one has the courage to face the Banshee wails of “socialism” that already echo from the right and would intensify to the sound of a Category 3 hurricane. Politically, it would be seen as a bridge too far. Had Obama said in the presidential campaign that he was for a single-payer option, the Democrats on Capitol Hill might have had the temerity to investigate what works remarkably well in Belgium and Japan, among dozens of other countries.

 

Globally, the single-payer option – or, let’s face it, nationalization – has brought in universal coverage at about half of what the United States spends today; let alone what we will spend with the clumsy hybrid that the president is selling and Congress is concocting.

 

Under nearly all state-operated systems, private insurers have a role. My friends in Britain and Ireland all have private insurance for bespoke medicine above that available on the state system. Sure, state systems are criticized, especially in Italy (along with everything else), but not one country that has a state system has made any political move to repeal it. State systems are popular.

 

In Britain, where I have had most experience with the National Health Service, it is the third rail of their politics. Even the great advocate of free enterprise, Margaret Thatcher, did not dare to even think of touching it. Every British Tory wants to make it more efficient, but none wants to repeal it. Thatcher repealed anything that had the whiff of socialism about it and privatized much, including the railways, but the health system was sacrosanct.

 

The issue should not be whether we can keep every insurer alive and whether we should continue to burden employers with the health care of their staffs and their families, but whether a new system will deliver for all Americans at reasonable cost.

 

It is probably too late to rationalize the system all at once. There are too many interests, too much money at stake and a pathological fear of government, fanned by the loud few. No matter that the Tennessee Valley Authority works well, that the Veterans Administration is a larger, and probably better, state program than those in many countries. It is not just in health care that Congress and the administration are engaged in workaround. Cap-and-trade in energy is another piece of avoidance.

Utility chief, after utility chief, after utility chief–among them, John Rowe of Exelon and James Rogers of Duke–has said that a simple carbon tax would be more effective and cheaper than cap-and-trade. But the same people who yell “socialist” get severe arrhythmia at the mention of “tax.” Workaround.  –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

 

 

The Joy of the Private Car

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said Wednesday it will attempt to do what a string of economists and urban planners couldn’t: persuade the Congress to raise the federal gasoline tax to pay for better roads. — The Wall Street Journal

For all the problems that automobiles bring in society, they are wondrous things. They are, in a way, emblems of freedom. Surely private, discreet mobility is nearly beyond price?

There’s a price and a high one at that: pollution, congestion, sprawl, accident lethality and the geopolitics of oil. But oh, the joy of turning the key and heading to a highway; free, anonymous and among your own things (or your own mess, to be precise), listening to your choice of music–your life briefly in your control.

So far, the joys of the personal car have mysteriously evaded the attention of major poets and composers. Maybe it’s because cars bring joy equally to the proletariat and to the elite.

The primary differentiation between vehicles is not aesthetic but financial. A neat car, like a Bentley or a Maybach, costs money, lots of it, compared to, say, a Ford Focus. Yet their function is identical: they move us around.

Just four times in the 100-plus-year history of the automobile has a truly classless–in the sense that blue jeans are classless–car appeared on the streets. These were vehicles driven by the wealthy and the lowly with equal enthusiasm. They were the Ford Model T, the Ford A, the Volkswagen Beetle and the Morris Minor. All were owned and driven across the social spectrum.

It is an American conceit to believe that our love affair with the automobile is unique. It isn’t: It’s as universal as love itself. The poorest Indian dreams of abandoning the bullock cart for the automobile and even Europeans, who are well served with public transportation, love their cars.

One of the first consequences of Irish prosperity was that Dublin became a traffic jam. The Irish folk song goes, In Dublin’s fair city where the girls are so pretty/ I once met a girl named sweet Molly Malone/and she wheeled her wheel barrow/ through the streets broad and narrow/
singing cockles and mussels alive alive oh. Well, Molly would have a hell of a job in today’s traffic.

When Britain opened its beltway around London–known as the M25 corridor or Orbital–in 1986, so many cars took to the road traffic stopped dead, despite designated speed of 70 mph.

What has happened in western Europe is that driving has become more of a recreational activity, and commuting to work is close to mandatory. London, for example, is the second great city in the world to impose a stiff charge on private cars entering the downtown. The first was Singapore.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg would like to do something similar in New York City, but he faces too many jurisdictions that feed traffic into the city. Other American cities do not have the public transportation infrastructure to be able to contemplate choking them off during the week.

New housing developments everywhere are antithetical to public transportation. The cul-de-sac is hard enough to get a fire truck into, let alone to run buses.

A second problem, after congestion, is where are we going to get the oil to fuel the fleet of cars which is growing exponentially around the world, with most that growth in China and India? That future, for a period of 60 or so years, could be natural gas or electricity–and the smart money is on electricity. The rub is that batteries are not yet up to the task; and today’s gasoline and diesel automobile needs a lot of power for non-motion functions, like air conditioning, lights, power windows, seats and trunks.

Will electric vehicles reach market fast enough? That depends on the thorny issue of geopolitics, religious fanaticism, royal families, and prosperity in India and China.

How to proceed? The government would like to move everything forward, but the Department of Energy is having difficulty getting research and development money out of the door, while local jurisdictions are cutting back on highway funds.

Enter the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with an unlikely proposal for a business group: a fuel tax devoted to transportation solutions. It’s radical, unexpected and comes from an organization with right-of-center clout.

Maybe one day, we’ll again tool down the open road—well, get into a stream of traffic that moves, whether it’s with hydrocarbon or electric fuel. Varoom!  –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

Girding Against a Non-Existent Enemy

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There is a new growth industry in Washington; one which will consume hundreds of millions of dollars before it has run its course, and one that is not needed. No, it is not a new government program. It is a new private sector movement to save capitalism, and it is spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce.

The Chamber has committed to raise and spend $100 million on an across-the-board effort to fortify capitalism through media and public affairs campaigns. It will be a big payday for public intellectuals who can whip up an audience about the incipient resurgence of, well, communism, socialism and maybe even monarchy.

Anyway government in general, and the administration of Barack Obama in particular, is sure to figure as the merciless opponent of capitalism, seeking to regulate it and nationalize it out of existence. Only Asia, it would seem, is immune from government’s dead hand. There, in the mythology of the times, governments work for capitalism, as with the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the global reach of China.

 

To be believe this you have to swallow hard and affirm that bureaucrats of Asia are oh-so-smart, while those of the United States and Europe are stupid, incompetent and out to promote failure.

 

The Chamber, one hastens to point out, is not the villain here; it is, if anything, the victim. A lot of Chamber members really believe that capitalism is endangered by the Obama administration and its preparedness to intrude into markets. This belief has been fed, this paranoia has been indulged by the far-right wing and its protagonists in the blogosphere and broadcasting.

 

The fact is that capitalism–the world of willing buyers and willing sellers–has been around since the dawn of human history. It is as natural, as native, as fundamental to human society as the quest for God or the organization of the family. Probably as old as the market itself are the rogues who distort the market for excessive gain. Christ did not throw the moneychangers out of the temple for praying too fervently. Nor did Lehman Brothers collapse because it was timid about leverage.

 

Equally, capitalism has had an historic problem with social justice. No less a philosopher of capital’s virtue than Irving Kristol, inventor of neo-conservatism and father of its proselytizer, Bill Kristol, has pointed out that capitalism would not find fault with slavery or worker exploitation. Other institutions must seek that rectification. In Kristol’s words, “Two cheers for capitalism.”

 

Capitalism’s great enemy was, of course, Karl Marx and his collaborator,

Frederick Engels (Lenin was an adapter). But after much struggle, communism, or anti-capitalism, failed abysmally. It was the worst social and economic experiment ever and its few remaining adherents, like Cuba, are themselves economic and social failures.

 

Daniel Yergin, author of “Commanding Heights,” makes the point that capitalism has swept away any thoughts that communism has a future. Yergin’s commanding heights are controlled by capitalist nations.

 

Yet the fear that the armies of controlled economies are on the march still haunts many business people, who should know better. There is plenty of irony to go around in this fight against nothing.

Health care is the Trojan horse of those who see the enemies of capitalism on the march. Ironically, it is the Chamber which has called for manufacturers to be saved from the burden of health care. It has also called for normalization of relations with Cuba and a national gasoline tax.

Capitalism is not in danger. Even Britain’s venerable Labor Party had shed most of its socialist principles to compete and win under Tony Blair. The great writer H.G.Wells, one of the fathers of science fiction (“War of the Worlds”), predicted that socialism would defeat capitalism because it was a system and capitalism was not.

Wells had it exactly wrong. Capitalism is a dynamic system and socialism or its extreme, communism, is not. –For North Star Writers Group

 

 

Public Faces, Scowls or Smiles?

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France is wiping its public face. Maybe you don’t think it needed it but the French do, and they have committed a chunk of their economic stimulus package to refreshing public buildings and historical treasures. The royal palaces of Fontainebleau and Versailles near Paris, and the many chateaus down the Loire River will benefit.

 

To the casual eye, these monuments, these aspects of the public face of France, looked in pretty good shape. But when this latest effort is finished, they should be as great as they were hundreds of years ago.

 

By contrast, the economic slump has forced U.S. jurisdictions to cut back on their expenditures for the public face of America. Those who had hoped that the stimulus package would revive the New Deal-era Works Projects Administration are disappointed. Federal and state governments are slashing funding for public works projects and letting public places decay.

 

Virginia is even closing some of the rest areas on its Interstates. These are not especially plentiful, but they are a godsend for truckers and people traveling with children and pets. They offer no food but they do offer clean toilets and, thoughtfully, an area for dogs to do what dogs do. No luxuries, just necessities.

 

France is not alone in thinking it must keep its public face clean and smiling. Allegedly, staid Britain works hard on its public face. For example the Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has promised that the double-decker London buses will not be phased out as his predecessor, Socialist Ken Livingstone, had tried to do.

 

Livingstone wanted all the city’s familiar red buses replaced with so-called bendy buses (articulated buses). On the face of it, the old buses are uneconomic; they take a crew of two, whereas the bendy buses only have a driver. Yet that first economic calculation does not tell the whole story: Johnson sees the double-decker buses as being an integral part of the public face of London.

 

Likewise, the black taxis of London. They are unique to London and they cost more than regular cars because they are purpose-built, and new designs are introduced every few years. Often modified, new design-taxis are built by different companies: Some are built by companies that are not otherwise in the automobile business. This procurement pattern keeps the innovations coming.

 

While it costs Londoners more for their buses and their taxis, it comforts them in a way; it makes them feel special. But the real dividends are in tourism: London is the most visited city in Europe.

 

Paris and Rome each have a high sense of their public face and a regard for the aesthetic sensibilities of the population. Also, they have a certain knowledge that that a smiling public face will bring the smiling tourist faces, clutching their dollars, yen and yuan.

 

At bottom, it may be more of a philosophical issue than an economic one. Half a century ago, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the “private affluence” and “public squalor” in the United States.

Not that there are no great public places in the United States: New York’s Central Park holds its own against London’s Hyde Park or Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if there were stimulus money to spruce them up and maybe create a great new public toy, like London’s giant Ferris wheel, The Eye. Churchill said that we shape buildings and then they shape us. Quite so. –For Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Power Lunches, Then and Now

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Despite Jimmy Carter, lunch is alive and well in Washington. But it is a different rite than it was before his presidency.

 

Carter was the president who launched an attack on the notorious three-martini lunch. He not only scorned the business lunch culture, but he also changed the tax law so that only half the cost of a business lunch can now be deducted.

 

Carter became a dirty word in the restaurants of Washington. Yet the change in lunch habits may have occurred anyway.

 

During the Carter years, drinking at lunch slowed to a stop. There is hardly any drinking at lunch these days: Headwaiters proffer wine lists to shaking heads.

 

It was not Carter’s jiggling the tax code that killed the three-martini lunch, but rather a great social change that coincided with his time in Washington. For complex reasons, the decision-makers of the big cities dried out in the 1970s. My guess is that the world became more competitive, secretaries were not prepared to cover for their intoxicated bosses, drunk-driving laws tightened and health became an issue.

 

For me, the old-time Washington lunch was exemplified by a wonderful man, a great friend and a tremendous lobbyist. His name was Tom Clark and he represented the nuclear interests of the General Electric Company in Washington. Clark—who, alas, died more than two decades ago–was the uncontested master of the Washington lunch. And, yes, he drank three martinis with his lunch every day.

 

Clark was an American patrician, a kind of nobleman. He was also marvelous company and a skilled lobbyist. His principal tool was lunch, but he did not roam from restaurant to restaurant. He ate his lunch every day at Le Provencal, a classic French restaurant, where he always sat at the same large, round table.

 

Clark’s guests were a who’s who of Washington movers and shakers. There would be a Cabinet secretary at his table, maybe a senator and often a House member. I was one of the regulars at his round table. As a reporter, these feasts were valuable but mostly fun. You could drink anything you liked so long as it was distilled, fermented or brewed. There was a large menu, but most of Clark’s guests followed his lead and ordered grilled Dover sole.

 

Well, there are no more long, three-martini lunches and grilled Dover sole has given way to a new kind of eating: stacked, fusion food favored by the dieting classes in Washington. Of course without alcohol, three-hour lunches are out. Now we choke down the ersatz food with bottled water, ice tea or diet soda. Tom Clark would not have approved.

 

It is the shorter lunch that has allowed the development of that gastronomic and political horror: the power breakfast. All over Washington power-brokers are breakfasting with people from Capitol Hill, the media and the political financiers, who are the kingmakers.

 

Eating around Washington is really not about deals and arm-twisting, but rather about opening and keeping open channels of communication that later might be used to push a lobbying message. In the days when the martini ruled, it was a bit about communications, but mostly it was fun. It was just that it was more productive to have fun with a Cabinet member or an important senator than, well, your neighbor.

 

In the old days, the greatest lunch place in Washington was another French restaurant: Sans Souci. Its headwaiter, Paul, was known for his prodigious recall of names. You had to fight for a reservation and fight to be seated at a good table. The most important table–in a restaurant that was fairly small and had terraces of tables–was the Kennedy table. At this table, Kennedy family members dined with their White House and media friends. Columnist Art Buchwald was often seen with Ethel Kennedy. A cheery hail from that table as you passed by and you were on the A-list.

 

Today, there is nothing that looks like an A-list in Washington, and no restaurant dominates political and media circles. Also since the Carter presidency, White House staffers have favored the White House mess over restaurants.

 

Only retired people dare quaff midday martinis these days. As Rudyard Kipling noted, “There’s sore decline in Adam’s line.”  –For North Star Writers Group